St Peters Basilica

Vatican City, Italy
St. Peters Basilica is the central place of the Roman Catholic Church. From its inception, it took 225 years to complete. No fewer than sixteen architects were responsible for it, under the patronage of twenty-two popes. Nevertheless, the great building presents a degree of integrity, of harmony (perhaps helped by the mellowing passage of the centuries) that might seem improbable given its heterogeneous and sometimes philosophically conflicting sources; that ultimate unity of form and detail is in itself no small architectural feat. In a.d 323, the first Christian Roman, emperor, Constantine the Great (died 337), commissioned a magnificent basilica on the Vatican Hill, south of the River Tiber. It was built with difficulty on the sloping site, its altar supposedly above the spot where St. Peter was believed to have been buried around a.d. 64, and dedicated to him. Twelve centuries passed from the building of Constantines basilica to the first phase of its demolition. Between 1309 and 1377, for political reasons, the papal residence was at Avignon, France. Rome became derelict; according to some sources, packs of wolves roamed the streets. Its churches were neglected, and the old St. Peters descended into decay, its walls leaning and its frescoes encrusted with dust and grime. With the popes again in residence, around the middle of the fifteenth century Rome succeeded Florence as the center of the Italian Renaissance, and in 1452 Pope Nicholas V (reigned 1447 1455) commissioned the architect Bernardo Rossellino (1409 1464) to build a new apse for St. Peters west of the old one. Rossellino, who had already restored the church of San Francesco, Assisi, and many other buildings in Italy, proposed to surround the choir and transept, continuing the elongated Latin-cross plan. But only the tribune and foundations had been built when Nicholas V died and work stopped. Pope Paul II (1464 1471) passed the project to Giuliano da Sangallo in 1470, but none of the subsequent three popes pursued it. Early in 1505 the warrior-pope Julius II (1505 1513) was considering what form his own tomb might take. The sculptor Michelangelo Buonarotti designed an imposing monument, but it called for an appropriate setting. Julius decided to rebuild St. Peters, and late in 1505, a competition was held for the design. The winner was Donato Bramante, who, inspired by the ancient Pantheon in Rome, proposed a Greek cross (all of the arms of which are equal), with towers at the corners and a central dome raised on a drum. Julius laid the foundation stone on 18 April 1506. Despite the theological and esthetic arguments for a centrally planned church, the Greek cross was impractical for the Roman liturgy and thus unacceptable to the clergy. Bramante lengthened one arm to form the traditional Latin cross. Much of Julius IIs money was diverted to wars with the French, and when his architect died in 1514, only the four main piers of St. Peters were completed. They determined all further developments. Juliuss successor, the Borgia Leo X (1513 1521), commissioned Rafaello da Urbino, assisted by Giuliano da Sangallo and Fra Giocondo da Verona. The latter two modified Bramantes plan to a slightly elongated central nave with three aisles on either side. They died in 1516 and 1515, respectively, and Rafaello simplified their plan, seemingly to little effect. After his death in 1520 the new architects, Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, Baldassarre Peruzzi, and Andrea Sansovino, without fixed plans and [attempting] all manner of experiments,